GOP Member Strikes Blow to Trump PAC

GOP Member Strikes Blow to Trump PAC

Wisconsin’s ethics commission, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, suggested that a political action committee (PAC) supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign might have broken the law. Named the Save America PAC, it allegedly tried to give a lot of money illegally to Adam Steen. He was running against Robin Vos, who is a Republican and the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly.

Falling Out

Trump and Vos, who used to be friendly, started having problems after Vos said it wasn’t possible to change the results of the 2020 election. Trump said the election was stolen because of voter fraud, but there hasn’t been strong proof of that.

Pat Strachota, a Republican who used to be the assembly speaker, is the ethics commission chair. She agreed to recommend charges against the PAC. This means at least one other Republican on the commission also wanted to charge the PAC. The commission said there’s a good chance that the PAC tried to send over $40,000 to Steen’s campaign illegally. They passed on the case to local district attorneys, as reported by Newsweek.

Unregulated Spending

In Wisconsin, people can only donate up to $1,000 to a political candidate. However, political parties can give as much as they want. To get around this rule, it’s claimed that people who wanted to give more than $1,000 to Steen’s campaign would donate to local county parties. They would then say the money was for Steen, and the county parties would pass it along to him. The Save America PAC is said to have given $5,000 to three different local Republican county parties with the intention that the money would benefit Adam Steen’s campaign. According to documents, this happened on August 31 and September 1, 2022.

The documents suggest that there were talks about using the benefit before making the donation money for Steen. The county parties then either gave the money directly to Steen’s campaign or paid vendors on behalf of the campaign. This breaks the campaign finance laws in Wisconsin. The commission didn’t name any specific person to be charged, only mentioning that the PAC’s “agents” might have broken the law.

Trump’s Support Wasn’t Enough

Despite efforts to remove Vos, he won the 2022 Republican primary by 260 votes, a blow to Trump in Wisconsin. Vos then easily won the general election, defeating a Democratic challenger and Steen, who ran as a write-in candidate. Trump supported Steen in a statement, criticizing Vos as a “RINO” who didn’t support “America First” policies. Vos had questioned the 2020 election, but ultimately, he decided not to decertify the results, angered some of Trump’s supporters.

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